Mike Konczal

Roosevelt Institute Fellow
Roosevelt Institute Profile

Recent Posts by Mike Konczal

  • Rortybomb

    Beta: Universal Basic Income Calculator

    May 14, 2013Mike Konczal

    Click here to try a new Universal Basic Income calculator. You can click on which programs you'd like to turn into a UBI, and what taxes you'd be willing to put into motion, and it will tell you how large of a UBI can be supported with those resources. You can also type in your own numbers if you are interested.

    Over the weekend I wrote a column for Wonkblog on why a Universal Basic Income would be a good idea. At the same time, Jesse Myerson and Alexis Goldstein discussed the topic in the first episode of their new podcast, Beyond the Pale. Matt Bruenig and Peter Frase discussed whether a UBI is Utopian, and have a fascinating exchange about the idea of a UBI and policy and strategy.

    The calculator is in a beta-test mode, and it isn't nice looking, but it might be a useful exercise in how the numbers might actually work. I'll say that playing with the numbers makes me more sympathetic with Barbara Bergmann's point that a “fully developed welfare state deserves priority over Basic Income because it accomplishes what Basic Income does not: it guarantees that certain specific human needs will be met.” You have to jettison a lot of the welfare state, raise taxes a significant amount, or phase it out aggressive and remove the universal component, to get to numbers like $10,000. On the other hand, it isn't that hard to get to the $2,000-$3,000 range.

    But I'm interested in what you think of it.

    Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

      

     

    Click here to try a new Universal Basic Income calculator. You can click on which programs you'd like to turn into a UBI, and what taxes you'd be willing to put into motion, and it will tell you how large of a UBI can be supported with those resources. You can also type in your own numbers if you are interested.

    Over the weekend I wrote a column for Wonkblog on why a Universal Basic Income would be a good idea. At the same time, Jesse Myerson and Alexis Goldstein discussed the topic in the first episode of their new podcast, Beyond the Pale. Matt Bruenig and Peter Frase discussed whether a UBI is Utopian, and have a fascinating exchange about the idea of a UBI and policy and strategy.

    The calculator is in a beta-test mode, and it isn't nice looking, but it might be a useful exercise in how the numbers might actually work. I'll say that playing with the numbers makes me more sympathetic to Barbara Bergmann's point that a “fully developed welfare state deserves priority over Basic Income because it accomplishes what Basic Income does not: it guarantees that certain specific human needs will be met.” You have to jettison a lot of the welfare state, raise taxes a significant amount, or phase it out aggressively and remove the universal component to get to numbers like $10,000. On the other hand, it isn't that hard to get to the $2,000-$3,000 range.

    But I'm interested in what you think of it.

    Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

      

     

    Read more

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  • Rortybomb

    Liberal Wonk Blogging Could Be Your Life

    May 9, 2013Mike Konczal

    As the Reinhart-Rogoff story started up, Peter Frase of Jacobin wrote a critique of liberal wonk bloggers titled “The Perils of Wonkery.” Now that things have calmed down, I’m going to respond. Fair warning: this post will be a bit navel-gazing.

    I recommend reading Peter’s post first, but to summarize, it makes two broad claims against liberal wonk bloggers. The first is the critique of the academic against the journalist. This doesn’t engage why wonk blogging has evolved or the role it plays. The second critique is the leftist against the technocratic liberal, which I find doesn’t acknowledge the actual ideological space created in wonk blogging. I find both of Frase’s arguments unpersuasive and also under-theorized. Let’s take them in order.

    1. Liberal Wonks in Practice

    Frase, a sociologist, locates the peril of wonkery in the fact that it needs to engage with academic research that often is more complicated than the writers have the ability to critically evaluate. “The function of the wonk is to translate the empirical findings of experts for the general public.” As such they are subject to a form of source capture, where they need to rely on the experts they are reporting on, as “they will necessarily have far less expertise than the people whose findings are being conveyed.”

    We can generalize this critique as one that academics make of journalists all the time. Journalists don’t understand the subtlety of research and how it often functions as a discourse that changes over time. It’s a conversation on a very long time scale, rather than a race with winners and losers. They want dramatic headlines, conflicts, and cliffhangers, often over whether something is “good” or “bad” or other topics that make academics roll their eyes. Where researchers spend a lifetime on a handful of topics, reporters bounce from topic to topic, oftentimes in the course of a single day, made even worse through the “hamster wheel” of online blogs.

    That’s a problem, as far as it goes. But bad journalism is easily countered by...good journalism. Source capture actually strikes me as one of the smaller problems wonk bloggers face. If journalists are worried that they are over-influenced by their source, they can just call another expert -- which is what Wonkblog did for the Reinhart/Rogoff studies. Wonk bloggers tend to focus on a group of related areas, and like any other journalist, they develop a list of the top researchers in any area to navigate complicated issues. They call people and ask questions.

    It is true that in the wonk space, judgments on where the wonk’s self-declared expertise ends and where the line should be drawn on what is covered explicitly lie with the authors themselves. But this just makes explicit what is hidden in all of journalism, which is the problem of where to draw these lines.

    It’s true that these debates take place within the context of existing policy research. A friend noted that Frase’s piece rests on a weird contradiction: it’s about how wonks don’t have enough expertise, but also how expertise is just a way of power and capital exerting itself and should be resisted. But that assumes that wonk blogging is just a replication of ruling ideology.

    1.a What Creates Wonks?

    We’ll talk about ideology more in a minute, but it’s surprising that Frase doesn’t even try to ground his analysis in the material base of institutions that create and fashion liberal writers. Frase seems to imply that the peril derives from personality-driven ladder-climbing, or to bask in the reflected glory of Serious People; he’s a step away from saying what wonks do is all about getting invited to cocktail parties.

    But let’s try to provide that context for him. Why has “wonk” analysis risen in status within the “liberal” parts of the blogosphere, and what does that tell us about our current moment?

    Contrasted with their counterparts on the right, young liberal writers come up through journalistic enterprises. That’s where they build their expertise, their approaches, their sensibilities, and their dispositions, even if they go on to other forms of opinion writing. Internships at The Nation, The American Prospect, or The New Republic are a common touchstone, with the Huffington Post, TPM, and Think Progress recently joining them. Though this work has an ideological basis, the work is journalism. Pride, at the end of the day, comes from breaking stories, working sources, building narratives, and giving a clear understanding of the scale and the scope of relevant actions. And part of that reporter fashioning will involve including all sides, and acting like more of a referee than an activist.

    Where do young conservatives come from? They are built up as pundits, ideological writers, or as “analysts” or “experts” at conservative think-tanks. These conservatives then go out and populate the broader conservative infrastructure. As Helen Rittlemeyer notes, one reason conservative publications are declining in quality is because they are being filled with those who work at conservative think tanks (and are thus subsidized by the tax code and conservative movement money).

    This is an important distinction when you see the numerous criticisms asking for wonky liberals to get more ideological. Bhaskar Sunkara argues that liberal wonks have a kind of “rigid simplicity” that is incapable of even understanding, much less challenging, the conservative ideology it is meant to counter. Conor Williams makes a similar argument, arguing that the “wonks’ focus on policy details blinds them to political realities.” In a fascinating essay comparing wonks to conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, Jesse Elias Spafford writes in The New Inquiry that wonks “have risen to prominence because they come wrapped in the respectable neutrality of the scientist and have eschewed the partisan bias of the demagogue” and that, instead of agreed-upon facts, “our political discussions need to grapple with ideology and psychology, and with the underlying tendencies that draw people to particular ideologies.”

    But just as there are numerous pleas for liberal writers to get more ideological, there are pleas on the right for more actual journalism. The post-election version of this was from Michael Calderone at Huffington Post, ”Conservative Media Struggles For Credibility.” The hook was that everyone was excited because there was finally one genuinely good conservative congressional reporter in Robert Costa. Previous versions include Tucker Carlson getting boos at CPAC for saying, “The New York Times is a liberal newspaper. They go out, and they get the facts. Conservatives need to copy that.” Connor Friedersdorf issued a similar call back in 2008: “[a] political movement cannot survive on commentary and analysis alone! Were there only as talented a cadre of young right-leaning reporters dedicated to the journalistic project...the right must conclude that we’re better off joining the journalistic project than trying to discredit it.”

    Meanwhile, the attempts by actual reporters (Tucker Carlson, Matthew Continetti) to build journalistic enterprises on the right (Daily Caller, Free Beacon) have collapsed into hackish parodies. The funders are wising up; the Koch Brothers are looking to just purchase newspapers wholesale rather than trying to build them out organically through the movement.

    1.b Why Liberal Wonks?

    Frase also makes no attempt to understand why wonk blogging has risen right now. And even a cursory glance at the historical moment makes it clear why wonk blogging has become important. From 2009-2010, several major pieces of legislation quickly came up for debate on core economic concerns: the ARRA stimulus and more general macroeconomic stabilization, health care reform, financial reform, immigration reform, unionization law, and carbon pricing.

    Some passed, some didn’t. But all of these were complicated, evolved rapidly, and needed to be explained at a quick pace. Conventional journalism wasn’t up to the task, and wonks stepped up. As these reforms unfolded, often shifting week by week, there were important battles over how to understand the individual parts. There’s a passage from Alan Brinkley about businessmen asking, in 1940, if the “basic principle of the New Deal were economically sound?” Wonks had to answer the specific questions - is the public option important? - but also explain what parts were sound and why.

    So I disagree with Spafford, who writes, “The startling rise of the wonk to political prominence has been buoyed in large part by the hope that the scientific objectivity of the technocrat might finally resolve political disagreement.“ The wonk rises more with the wave of liberal legislation of the 111th United States Congress, rather than the waves of centrist deficit reduction or conservative counter-mobilization.

    It’s true that the right is more ideologically coherent and part of a “movement.” But it’s not clear to me that this is working well for them right now, or that liberals would be right to try a strategy of replication. Especially as I contest that wonk blogging doesn’t have an ideological edge.

    2. Liberal Wonkery as Ideology

    As an aside, here's Arthur Delaney's first wonk chart:

    In Frase’s mind, wonkblogging is a “way of policing ideological boundaries and maintaining the illusion that the ruling ideology is merely bi-partisan common sense.” Wonk bloggers merely reproduce technocracy, performing the Very Serious Analysis that always comes back to a set of narrow concerns that coincide with ruling interests.

    But is the background ideology of liberal bloggers a “ruling ideology” committed to the status quo? I don’t buy it. First off, just the act of writing about problems and potential policy solutions casts them as problems in need of a solution. Indeed, as many on the right have noted, a crucial feature of wonk blogging isn’t the creation of “solutions” to policy problem but the creation of “problems” in the first place.

    Think of some of the things liberal wonk bloggers (at least in the economics space) focus on: unemployment; lack of access to quality, affordable health care; wages decoupled from productivity. These aren’t just put out there as crappy things that are happening. Wonks don’t focus on how there’s nothing good on television, or rain on your wedding day. And the problems they signal aren’t, usually, thought of as personal failings or requiring private, civic solutions. They are problems that the public needs a response for.

    What does that amount to? If you link them together, they tell a story about how unemployment is a vicious problem we can counteract, that the shocks we face in life should be insured against, that markets fail or need to be revealed as constructed. And they don’t argue “just deserts” -- that some should be left behind, or that hierarchy and inequality are virtues in and of themselves -- and instead produce analyses in support of economic and social equality. Everyone should have access to a job, or health care, or a secure retirement.

    In other words, they describe the core project of modern American liberalism. Keynesian economics, social insurance, the regulatory state and political equality: wonk blogging builds all of this brick by brick from the bottom-up. Signaling where reform needs to go is increasingly being viewed as the important role pundits and analysts carry out. And rather than derive them from ideology top-down, they’re built bottom-up as a series of problems to be solved.

    Wonkiness-as-ideology has its downsides, of course. In line with Frase’s critique, wonky analysis makes virtues uncritically out of economic concepts like “choice” and “markets,” while having no language for “decommodification” or “workplace democracy.” They reflect the economic language of a neoliberal age. (Though if you are Ira Katznelson, you’d argue that this wonky, technocratic, public policy focus of liberalism was baked into the cake in the late 1940s.) There’s an element of liberalism that is focused on “how do we share the fruits of our economic prosperity” that hits a wall in an age of stagnation and austerity.

    But I wouldn’t trade it for what the left seems to be offering. Indeed one of the better achievements of mid-century democratic socialism, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, was proto-wonk blogging. He identified problems. He consciously didn't mention ideology, knowing full well that stating the problem in the context of actually existing solutions would create the real politics. And if he had access to modern computing, Harrington certainly would have put a lot of charts in his book and posted them online.

    Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

      

     

    As the Reinhart-Rogoff story started up, Peter Frase of Jacobin wrote a critique of liberal wonk bloggers titled “The Perils of Wonkery.” Now that things have calmed down, I’m going to respond. Fair warning: this post will be a bit navel-gazing.

    I recommend reading Peter’s post first, but to summarize, it makes two broad claims against liberal wonk bloggers. The first is the critique of the academic against the journalist. This doesn’t engage why wonk blogging has evolved or the role it plays. The second critique is the leftist against the technocratic liberal, which I find doesn’t acknowledge the actual ideological space created in wonk blogging. I find both of Frase’s arguments unpersuasive and also under-theorized. Let’s take them in order.

    1. Liberal Wonks in Practice

    Frase, a sociologist, locates the peril of wonkery in the fact that it needs to engage with academic research that often is more complicated than the writers have the ability to critically evaluate. “The function of the wonk is to translate the empirical findings of experts for the general public.” As such they are subject to a form of source capture, where they need to rely on the experts they are reporting on, as “they will necessarily have far less expertise than the people whose findings are being conveyed.”

    We can generalize this critique as one that academics make of journalists all the time. Journalists don’t understand the subtlety of research and how it often functions as a discourse that changes over time. It’s a conversation on a very long time scale, rather than a race with winners and losers. They want dramatic headlines, conflicts, and cliffhangers, often over whether something is “good” or “bad” or other topics that make academics roll their eyes. Where researchers spend a lifetime on a handful of topics, reporters bounce from topic to topic, oftentimes in the course of a single day, made even worse through the “hamster wheel” of online blogs.

    That’s a problem, as far as it goes. But bad journalism is easily countered by...good journalism. Source capture actually strikes me as one of the smaller problems wonk bloggers face. If journalists are worried that they are over-influenced by their source, they can just call another expert -- which is what Wonkblog did for the Reinhart/Rogoff studies. Wonk bloggers tend to focus on a group of related areas, and like any other journalist, they develop a list of the top researchers in any area to navigate complicated issues. They call people and ask questions.

    It is true that in the wonk space, judgments on where the wonk’s self-declared expertise ends and where the line should be drawn on what is covered explicitly lie with the authors themselves. But this just makes explicit what is hidden in all of journalism, which is the problem of where to draw these lines.

    It’s true that these debates take place within the context of existing policy research. A friend noted that Frase’s piece rests on a weird contradiction: it’s about how wonks don’t have enough expertise, but also how expertise is just a way of power and capital exerting itself and should be resisted. But that assumes that wonk blogging is just a replication of ruling ideology.

    1.a What Creates Wonks?

    We’ll talk about ideology more in a minute, but it’s surprising that Frase doesn’t even try to ground his analysis in the material base of institutions that create and fashion liberal writers. Frase seems to imply that the peril derives from personality-driven ladder-climbing, or to bask in the reflected glory of Serious People; he’s a step away from saying what wonks do is all about getting invited to cocktail parties.

    But let’s try to provide that context for him. Why has “wonk” analysis risen in status within the “liberal” parts of the blogosphere, and what does that tell us about our current moment?

    Contrasted with their counterparts on the right, young liberal writers come up through journalistic enterprises. That’s where they build their expertise, their approaches, their sensibilities, and their dispositions, even if they go on to other forms of opinion writing. Internships at The Nation, The American Prospect, or The New Republic are a common touchstone, with the Huffington Post, TPM, and Think Progress recently joining them. Though this work has an ideological basis, the work is journalism. Pride, at the end of the day, comes from breaking stories, working sources, building narratives, and giving a clear understanding of the scale and the scope of relevant actions. And part of that reporter fashioning will involve including all sides, and acting like more of a referee than an activist.

    Where do young conservatives come from? They are built up as pundits, ideological writers, or as “analysts” or “experts” at conservative think-tanks. These conservatives then go out and populate the broader conservative infrastructure. As Helen Rittlemeyer notes, one reason conservative publications are declining in quality is because they are being filled with those who work at conservative think tanks (and are thus subsidized by the tax code and conservative movement money).

    This is an important distinction when you see the numerous criticisms asking for wonky liberals to get more ideological. Bhaskar Sunkara argues that liberal wonks have a kind of “rigid simplicity” that is incapable of even understanding, much less challenging, the conservative ideology it is meant to counter. Conor Williams makes a similar argument, arguing that the “wonks’ focus on policy details blinds them to political realities.” In a fascinating essay comparing wonks to conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, Jesse Elias Spafford writes in The New Inquiry that wonks “have risen to prominence because they come wrapped in the respectable neutrality of the scientist and have eschewed the partisan bias of the demagogue” and that, instead of agreed-upon facts, “our political discussions need to grapple with ideology and psychology, and with the underlying tendencies that draw people to particular ideologies.”

    But just as there are numerous pleas for liberal writers to get more ideological, there are pleas on the right for more actual journalism. The post-election version of this was from Michael Calderone at Huffington Post, ”Conservative Media Struggles For Credibility.” The hook was that everyone was excited because there was finally one genuinely good conservative congressional reporter in Robert Costa. Previous versions include Tucker Carlson getting boos at CPAC for saying, “The New York Times is a liberal newspaper. They go out, and they get the facts. Conservatives need to copy that.” Connor Friedersdorf issued a similar call back in 2008: “[a] political movement cannot survive on commentary and analysis alone! Were there only as talented a cadre of young right-leaning reporters dedicated to the journalistic project...the right must conclude that we’re better off joining the journalistic project than trying to discredit it.”

    Meanwhile, the attempts by actual reporters (Tucker Carlson, Matthew Continetti) to build journalistic enterprises on the right (Daily Caller, Free Beacon) have collapsed into hackish parodies. The funders are wising up; the Koch Brothers are looking to just purchase newspapers wholesale rather than trying to build them out organically through the movement.

    1.b Why Liberal Wonks?

    Frase also makes no attempt to understand why wonk blogging has risen right now. And even a cursory glance at the historical moment makes it clear why wonk blogging has become important. From 2009-2010, several major pieces of legislation quickly came up for debate on core economic concerns: the ARRA stimulus and more general macroeconomic stabilization, health care reform, financial reform, immigration reform, unionization law, and carbon pricing.

    Some passed, some didn’t. But all of these were complicated, evolved rapidly, and needed to be explained at a quick pace. Conventional journalism wasn’t up to the task, and wonks stepped up. As these reforms unfolded, often shifting week by week, there were important battles over how to understand the individual parts. There’s a passage from Alan Brinkley about businessmen asking, in 1940, if the “basic principle of the New Deal were economically sound?” Wonks had to answer the specific questions - is the public option important? - but also explain what parts were sound and why.

    So I disagree with Spafford, who writes, “The startling rise of the wonk to political prominence has been buoyed in large part by the hope that the scientific objectivity of the technocrat might finally resolve political disagreement.“ The wonk rises more with the wave of liberal legislation of the 111th United States Congress, rather than the waves of centrist deficit reduction or conservative counter-mobilization.

    It’s true that the right is more ideologically coherent and part of a “movement.” But it’s not clear to me that this is working well for them right now, or that liberals would be right to try a strategy of replication. Especially as I contest that wonk blogging doesn’t have an ideological edge.

    2. Liberal Wonkery as Ideology

    As an aside, here's Arthur Delaney's first wonk chart:

    In Frase’s mind, wonkblogging is a “way of policing ideological boundaries and maintaining the illusion that the ruling ideology is merely bi-partisan common sense.” Wonk bloggers merely reproduce technocracy, performing the Very Serious Analysis that always comes back to a set of narrow concerns that coincide with ruling interests.

    But is the background ideology of liberal bloggers a “ruling ideology” committed to the status quo? I don’t buy it. First off, just the act of writing about problems and potential policy solutions casts them as problems in need of a solution. Indeed, as many on the right have noted, a crucial feature of wonk blogging isn’t the creation of “solutions” to policy problem but the creation of “problems” in the first place.

    Think of some of the things liberal wonk bloggers (at least in the economics space) focus on: unemployment; lack of access to quality, affordable health care; wages decoupled from productivity. These aren’t just put out there as crappy things that are happening. Wonks don’t focus on how there’s nothing good on television, or rain on your wedding day. And the problems they signal aren’t, usually, thought of as personal failings or requiring private, civic solutions. They are problems that the public needs a response for.

    What does that amount to? If you link them together, they tell a story about how unemployment is a vicious problem we can counteract, that the shocks we face in life should be insured against, that markets fail or need to be revealed as constructed. And they don’t argue “just deserts” -- that some should be left behind, or that hierarchy and inequality are virtues in and of themselves -- and instead produce analyses in support of economic and social equality. Everyone should have access to a job, or health care, or a secure retirement.

    In other words, they describe the core project of modern American liberalism. Keynesian economics, social insurance, the regulatory state and political equality: wonk blogging builds all of this brick by brick from the bottom-up. Signaling where reform needs to go is increasingly being viewed as the important role pundits and analysts carry out. And rather than derive them from ideology top-down, they’re built bottom-up as a series of problems to be solved.

    Wonkiness-as-ideology has its downsides, of course. In line with Frase’s critique, wonky analysis makes virtues uncritically out of economic concepts like “choice” and “markets,” while having no language for “decommodification” or “workplace democracy.” They reflect the economic language of a neoliberal age. (Though if you are Ira Katznelson, you’d argue that this wonky, technocratic, public policy focus of liberalism was baked into the cake in the late 1940s.) There’s an element of liberalism that is focused on “how do we share the fruits of our economic prosperity” that hits a wall in an age of stagnation and austerity.

    But I wouldn’t trade it for what the left seems to be offering. Indeed one of the better achievements of mid-century democratic socialism, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, was proto-wonk blogging. He identified problems. He consciously didn't mention ideology, knowing full well that stating the problem in the context of actually existing solutions would create the real politics. And if he had access to modern computing, Harrington certainly would have put a lot of charts in his book and posted them online.

    Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

      

     

    Read more

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  • Rortybomb

    What Would the "Financial Instability" Argument Look Like For Any Other Industry?

    May 7, 2013Mike Konczal

    It’s becoming a surprisingly influential argument given that it hasn’t been well presented or argued, much less vetted and challenged. What is it? The argument that we should raise interest rates or otherwise contract monetary policy in order to preserve “financial stability.”

    Brad Delong says critiquing this idea is “PRIORITY #1 RED FLAG OMEGA,” while Nick Rowe argues that this idea “may be influential. And that idea is horribly wrong.”

    Here’s one version of the argument, from a recent speech by Narayana Kocherlakota:

    “On the one hand, raising the real interest rate will definitely lead to lower employment and prices. On the other hand, raising the real interest rate may reduce the risk of a financial crisis—a crisis which could give rise to a much larger fall in employment and prices. Thus, the Committee has to weigh the certainty of a costly deviation from its dual mandate objectives against the benefit of reducing the probability of an even larger deviation from those objectives.”

    Tim Duy and Ryan Avent commented on this speech, which essentially argued that that raising rates would certainly cause a problem, but rates at their current value could cause even bigger problems.

    Let’s be clear on the terms: should we risk another immediate recession (“lower employment and prices”) to preserve a thing called “financial stability?” Five immediate problems jump out from this argument. Nick Rowe emphasized tackling this on an abstract level; I’m going to focus on practical stuff.

    1. This whole story seems predicated on the idea that expansionary monetary policy was behind the housing bubble and collapse. I think there’s very little hard evidence for that. Also, the basic stories surrounding interest rates, as JW Mason mentioned in a guest post here, being too low for too long have some serious contradictions. (For instance, if the problem is a “global savings glut,” expansionary monetary policy should push against that by reducing capital inflows.) So if the idea is to risk another recession in order to not repeat the 2000s, we should work with a clearer story about what went wrong in the housing bubble.

    2. The term “reaching for yield” is often deployed in these arguments. Low rates means that traders have to take on bigger risks in order to earn a rate of return that is acceptable. (Is there a minimum level of profit that finance must make on lending? And should we throw people out of work to make sure they make it? I hadn’t heard of that, but sounds like a nice gig.)

    But either way, it isn’t clear that low rates drive reaching for yield. Yields are the difference between lending and funding rates. And as JW Mason again writes in an important post, banks’ funding costs are also affected by the policy rate. “Looking at the most recent cycle, the decline in the Fed Funds rate from around 5 percent in 2006-2007 to the zero of today has been associated with a 2.5 point fall in bank funding costs but only a 1.5 point fall in bank lending rates -- in other words, a one point increase in spreads.” If anything, the story is the opposite of what people are arguing.

    3. The best empirical evidence at understanding the “reach for yield” phenomenon I’ve seen comes from Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina from Harvard University, “Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market.” Here’s a Voxeu summary, and here’s the research pdf. They look at holdings of insurance companies, and find that, “conditional on credit ratings, insurance portfolios are systematically biased toward higher yield, higher CDS bonds...It is also more pronounced for firms with poor corporate governance and for which regulatory capital requirement is more binding.”

    This comes across as portfolio managers juking and manipulating capital requirements and the ratings agencies. The authors note that this is a major agency problem for insurance agencies. It was the strongest at the peak of the cycle, but went away during the recession.

    Now if I told you we should keep the economy in a permanent recession because senior managers at insurance companies aren’t good at their basic job of monitoring mid-level portfolio managers you’d probably think I was crazy. And I would be. Especially since it seems that “reach for yield” is tied less to monetary policy and more to gaming ratings-based capital requirements.

    4. If this is a serious problem, people should be talking about more serious forms of financial regulation. As a starter platform, we can raise capital requirements. Much of this “reach for yield” looks to be a regulatory arbitrage on ratings-based capital requirements, so, say, tripling the leverage requirement should net out the importance of the ratings agencies in capital requirements.

    This is why a more coherent story about what we are concerned about when we think about “financial stability” would help. If we need to make the financial system less complex and prone to abusive practices, requiring parties of a derivatives contract to hold a stake in the underlying asset would do a lot. Are we worried about contagion? In that case, force banks to hold more capital as well as convertible instruments. About bad debts holding back the economy? Then reform the bankruptcy code, dropping the 2005 “reforms.” Some people are demanding more jail sentences, not only for the benefit of the public but for boards and shareholders who can’t keep their workers in line.

    5. Because imagine this argument in the context of any other industry. Right now the interest rate is above where it needs to be to guarantee full employment. People are arguing that we should raise rates because banks might make loans, even though that is what the financial sector is supposed to do. (As Daniel Davies notes, “If the Federal Reserve sets out on a policy of lowering interest rates in order to encourage banks to make loans to the real economy, it is a bit weird for someone's main critique of the policy to be that it is encouraging banks to make loans.”)

    Now imagine the government was going to take some land it owns containing oil and sell it to an oil company. Could you imagine someone saying, “We shouldn’t do this, because we can’t assume that oil companies are capable of drilling, refining and selling that oil” as a valid concern? Not concerns about random spills or global warming? But instead expressing concerns about whether the industry is capable of executing its most basic function.

    Or take immigration. Imagine if a common response to letting a large number of high-skilled immigrants into the country would be “but we can’t assume that the labor market is capable of matching people with skills who want to work with employers who are willing to pay to complete jobs.” It’s tantamount to saying, “we shouldn’t assume that the labor market can do its basic function.”

    It’s hard not to read the financial stability arguments as saying “look, we can’t trust the financial sector to accomplish its most basic goals.” If true, that’s a very significant problem that should cause everyone a lot of concern. It should make us ask why we even have a financial system if we can’t expect it to function, or function only by putting the entire economy at risk.

    Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

      

     

    It’s becoming a surprisingly influential argument given that it hasn’t been well presented or argued, much less vetted and challenged. What is it? The argument that we should raise interest rates or otherwise contract monetary policy in order to preserve “financial stability.”

    Brad Delong says critiquing this idea is “PRIORITY #1 RED FLAG OMEGA,” while Nick Rowe argues that this idea “may be influential. And that idea is horribly wrong.”

    Here’s one version of the argument, from a recent speech by Narayana Kocherlakota:

    “On the one hand, raising the real interest rate will definitely lead to lower employment and prices. On the other hand, raising the real interest rate may reduce the risk of a financial crisis—a crisis which could give rise to a much larger fall in employment and prices. Thus, the Committee has to weigh the certainty of a costly deviation from its dual mandate objectives against the benefit of reducing the probability of an even larger deviation from those objectives.”

    Tim Duy and Ryan Avent commented on this speech, which essentially argued that that raising rates would certainly cause a problem, but rates at their current value could cause even bigger problems.

    Let’s be clear on the terms: should we risk another immediate recession (“lower employment and prices”) to preserve a thing called “financial stability?” Five immediate problems jump out from this argument. Nick Rowe emphasized tackling this on an abstract level; I’m going to focus on practical stuff.

    1. This whole story seems predicated on the idea that expansionary monetary policy was behind the housing bubble and collapse. I think there’s very little hard evidence for that. Also, the basic stories surrounding interest rates, as JW Mason mentioned in a guest post here, being too low for too long have some serious contradictions. (For instance, if the problem is a “global savings glut,” expansionary monetary policy should push against that by reducing capital inflows.) So if the idea is to risk another recession in order to not repeat the 2000s, we should work with a clearer story about what went wrong in the housing bubble.

    2. The term “reaching for yield” is often deployed in these arguments. Low rates means that traders have to take on bigger risks in order to earn a rate of return that is acceptable. (Is there a minimum level of profit that finance must make on lending? And should we throw people out of work to make sure they make it? I hadn’t heard of that, but sounds like a nice gig.)

    But either way, it isn’t clear that low rates drive reaching for yield. Yields are the difference between lending and funding rates. And as JW Mason again writes in an important post, banks’ funding costs are also affected by the policy rate. “Looking at the most recent cycle, the decline in the Fed Funds rate from around 5 percent in 2006-2007 to the zero of today has been associated with a 2.5 point fall in bank funding costs but only a 1.5 point fall in bank lending rates -- in other words, a one point increase in spreads.” If anything, the story is the opposite of what people are arguing.

    3. The best empirical evidence at understanding the “reach for yield” phenomenon I’ve seen comes from Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina from Harvard University, “Reaching for Yield in the Bond Market.” Here’s a Voxeu summary, and here’s the research pdf. They look at holdings of insurance companies, and find that, “conditional on credit ratings, insurance portfolios are systematically biased toward higher yield, higher CDS bonds...It is also more pronounced for firms with poor corporate governance and for which regulatory capital requirement is more binding.”

    This comes across as portfolio managers juking and manipulating capital requirements and the ratings agencies. The authors note that this is a major agency problem for insurance agencies. It was the strongest at the peak of the cycle, but went away during the recession.

    Now if I told you we should keep the economy in a permanent recession because senior managers at insurance companies aren’t good at their basic job of monitoring mid-level portfolio managers you’d probably think I was crazy. And I would be. Especially since it seems that “reach for yield” is tied less to monetary policy and more to gaming ratings-based capital requirements.

    4. If this is a serious problem, people should be talking about more serious forms of financial regulation. As a starter platform, we can raise capital requirements. Much of this “reach for yield” looks to be a regulatory arbitrage on ratings-based capital requirements, so, say, tripling the leverage requirement should net out the importance of the ratings agencies in capital requirements.

    This is why a more coherent story about what we are concerned about when we think about “financial stability” would help. If we need to make the financial system less complex and prone to abusive practices, requiring parties of a derivatives contract to hold a stake in the underlying asset would do a lot. Are we worried about contagion? In that case, force banks to hold more capital as well as convertible instruments. About bad debts holding back the economy? Then reform the bankruptcy code, dropping the 2005 “reforms.” Some people are demanding more jail sentences, not only for the benefit of the public but for boards and shareholders who can’t keep their workers in line.

    5. Because imagine this argument in the context of any other industry. Right now the interest rate is above where it needs to be to guarantee full employment. People are arguing that we should raise rates because banks might make loans, even though that is what the financial sector is supposed to do. (As Daniel Davies notes, “If the Federal Reserve sets out on a policy of lowering interest rates in order to encourage banks to make loans to the real economy, it is a bit weird for someone's main critique of the policy to be that it is encouraging banks to make loans.”)

    Now imagine the government was going to take some land it owns containing oil and sell it to an oil company. Could you imagine someone saying, “We shouldn’t do this, because we can’t assume that oil companies are capable of drilling, refining and selling that oil” as a valid concern? Not concerns about random spills or global warming? But instead expressing concerns about whether the industry is capable of executing its most basic function.

    Or take immigration. Imagine if a common response to letting a large number of high-skilled immigrants into the country would be “but we can’t assume that the labor market is capable of matching people with skills who want to work with employers who are willing to pay to complete jobs.” It’s tantamount to saying, “we shouldn’t assume that the labor market can do its basic function.”

    It’s hard not to read the financial stability arguments as saying “look, we can’t trust the financial sector to accomplish its most basic goals.” If true, that’s a very significant problem that should cause everyone a lot of concern. It should make us ask why we even have a financial system if we can’t expect it to function, or function only by putting the entire economy at risk.

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    Monetary Policy's Jurassic Park Problem at the Zero Lower Bound

    May 3, 2013Mike Konczal

    Remember those scenes in Jurassic Park where everyone has to stand really still? The T-Rex finds the humans, but its dinosaur brain only senses movements, so as long as nobody moves an inch, they are safe. But if they even twitch, they are going to be ripped to shreds. Those scenes are great.

    Last weekend, I wrote a piece for Wonkblog on monetary policy at the zero lower bound alongside austerity that got a great number of responses [1]. I want to respond to two points.

    1. One thing I wanted to engage on, and a point I hope gets some additional comments in 2013, is that we had a major shift in “expectations” management at the zero lower bound with the Evans Rule. I think that this form of expectation management is a trial run for more serious moves like using a higher inflation target or a nominal GDP target to gain traction at the zero lower bound. So how has it gone, and how would we know?

    I had thought a good measure of its success was whether short-term inflation would approach its 2 percent target, and whether or not it would go past. Other people, notably Matt O’Brien, had already flagged that 2 percent appeared to be a ceiling even with the Evans Rule in place.

    Some seem to be abandoning the Evans framework entirely, such as Ryan Avent writing this week that “the Evans rule is consistent with prolonged, Japanese style stagnation.” [2] Others argue that a consistent nominal GDP with austerity is sufficient evidence to show that the Evans Rule worked.

    I think this needs more exploration. We don’t often get a serious shift in expectations. That’s why I’m not sure how much the “gas pedal” from David Becksworth’s response is at play. Becksworth notes that the purchases in QE3 don’t automatically react to turbulence in the economy, and hopes that the Federal Reserve will buy more if the economy gets weaker. But if the expectations of where the Fed wants to end up are the real limiting factor for a robust recovery, why would a small change in purchases matter? This is partially why Greg Ip said the FOMC statement this week was “asymmetric,” even though the Fed said it might “increase or reduce” purchases: an increase is a small move, but a reduction is a genuine retrenchment.

    2. Another point is that expectations are important. I want to push back on Ryan Avent implying I “knew what conclusions were going to be drawn before the experiment was ever run.” I actually turned more negative about the December announcement while researching the post. I spoke to several economists who supported the Evans Rule at the time to see where they stood months later. I heard from many that they were excited about the proposal at first, but that they thought the policy was undermined significantly by FOMC members’ comments in March.

    What happened in March? As the Washington Post’s Ylan Q. Mui wrote in March, the Fed seemed split into two camps: “Hawks, who want to curtail quantitative easing programs because of the risks they create. And doves, who see evidence that they’re working well enough at stimulating growth that they might soon no longer be needed.” The Fed’s March minutes noted “that continued solid improvement in the outlook for the labor market could prompt the Committee to slow the pace of purchases beginning at some point over the next several meetings." Several economists I spoke with thought that this hurt the expansionary impact of monetary policy.

    Watch this again in slow-motion: Aggressive monetary policy begins to expand the economy, or at least gives the impression the economy is expanding. Central bankers argue that this means that they can pull back quicker than expected. (They don’t pull back; they just say they will.) The expectations for future policy then collapse, because central bankers signal that it will end too soon. The economy then weakens, going back to where it started.

    This is monetary policy in the style of those T-Rex scenes in Jurassic Park. The central bank says, “we are committing to extraordinary action,” and then everyone has to remain incredibly still for a long time. Just a random dovish member of the FOMC saying, “hey, maybe it’s working so well we should consider ending it early” is enough for dinosaurs to eat everyone the policy’s effectiveness in impacting expectations to collapse.

    If you believe this is a serious problem for monetary policy, well, this is precisely the time inconsistency problem Krugman identified in the late 1990s for Japan. The neutrality of money will cause an expansion to push up either prices or output, provided markets believe that it is permanent and that the central bank won’t immediately rush to stabilize prices the moment it gets a chance. And if the comments in March show that central banks aren’t going to “credibly promise to be irresponsible” with the Evans Rule, how will they do it with 4 percent inflation?

    Note that four months after the stimulus was passed, no Democrats would stand up and defend it. Yet the stimulus was carried out without a problem. Four months after the Evans Rule, it looked like Bernanke’s coalition was weakening, and that has major implications. The Wonkblog piece I wrote notes that the next step will have to be an explicit, permanent, new target. That would get around these issues about how permanent the monetary expansion will be. But if there’s barely enough support for the Evans Rule, it makes me worried we won’t get there anytime soon.

    [1] Responses include: Scott Sumner, Matt Yglesias, Paul Krugman, Reihan Salam, Ryan Avent, David Becksworth, Uneasy Money, Ramesh Ponnuru, southofthe49th, as well as a communist anarchist critique at pogoprinciple which notes that my “post-Fordist national fascist state fiscal policy” is exhausted. And that while “Keynesians are playing checkers, the monetarists are playing three dimensional chess.” Hmmm.

    [2] If the Evans Rule was a bust from the get-go, was all that 2012 energy put into trying to find clever ways of explaining “Delphic” versus “Odyssean” guidance language to a general audience a waste of time? Boo.

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    Remember those scenes in Jurassic Park where everyone has to stand really still? The T-Rex finds the humans, but its dinosaur brain only senses movements, so as long as nobody moves an inch, they are safe. But if they even twitch, they are going to be ripped to shreds. Those scenes are great.

    Last weekend, I wrote a piece for Wonkblog on monetary policy at the zero lower bound alongside austerity that got a great number of responses [1]. I want to respond to two points.

    1. One thing I wanted to engage on, and a point I hope gets some additional comments in 2013, is that we had a major shift in “expectations” management at the zero lower bound with the Evans Rule. I think that this form of expectation management is a trial run for more serious moves like using a higher inflation target or a nominal GDP target to gain traction at the zero lower bound. So how has it gone, and how would we know?

    I had thought a good measure of its success was whether short-term inflation would approach its 2 percent target, and whether or not it would go past. Other people, notably Matt O’Brien, had already flagged that 2 percent appeared to be a ceiling even with the Evans Rule in place.

    Some seem to be abandoning the Evans framework entirely, such as Ryan Avent writing this week that “the Evans rule is consistent with prolonged, Japanese style stagnation.” [2] Others argue that a consistent nominal GDP with austerity is sufficient evidence to show that the Evans Rule worked.

    I think this needs more exploration. We don’t often get a serious shift in expectations. That’s why I’m not sure how much the “gas pedal” from David Becksworth’s response is at play. Becksworth notes that the purchases in QE3 don’t automatically react to turbulence in the economy, and hopes that the Federal Reserve will buy more if the economy gets weaker. But if the expectations of where the Fed wants to end up are the real limiting factor for a robust recovery, why would a small change in purchases matter? This is partially why Greg Ip said the FOMC statement this week was “asymmetric,” even though the Fed said it might “increase or reduce” purchases: an increase is a small move, but a reduction is a genuine retrenchment.

    2. Another point is that expectations are important. I want to push back on Ryan Avent implying I “knew what conclusions were going to be drawn before the experiment was ever run.” I actually turned more negative about the December announcement while researching the post. I spoke to several economists who supported the Evans Rule at the time to see where they stood months later. I heard from many that they were excited about the proposal at first, but that they thought the policy was undermined significantly by FOMC members’ comments in March.

    What happened in March? As the Washington Post’s Ylan Q. Mui wrote in March, the Fed seemed split into two camps: “Hawks, who want to curtail quantitative easing programs because of the risks they create. And doves, who see evidence that they’re working well enough at stimulating growth that they might soon no longer be needed.” The Fed’s March minutes noted “that continued solid improvement in the outlook for the labor market could prompt the Committee to slow the pace of purchases beginning at some point over the next several meetings." Several economists I spoke with thought that this hurt the expansionary impact of monetary policy.

    Watch this again in slow-motion: Aggressive monetary policy begins to expand the economy, or at least gives the impression the economy is expanding. Central bankers argue that this means that they can pull back quicker than expected. (They don’t pull back; they just say they will.) The expectations for future policy then collapse, because central bankers signal that it will end too soon. The economy then weakens, going back to where it started.

    This is monetary policy in the style of those T-Rex scenes in Jurassic Park. The central bank says, “we are committing to extraordinary action,” and then everyone has to remain incredibly still for a long time. Just a random dovish member of the FOMC saying, “hey, maybe it’s working so well we should consider ending it early” is enough for dinosaurs to eat everyone the policy’s effectiveness in impacting expectations to collapse.

    If you believe this is a serious problem for monetary policy, well, this is precisely the time inconsistency problem Krugman identified in the late 1990s for Japan. The neutrality of money will cause an expansion to push up either prices or output, provided markets believe that it is permanent and that the central bank won’t immediately rush to stabilize prices the moment it gets a chance. And if the comments in March show that central banks aren’t going to “credibly promise to be irresponsible” with the Evans Rule, how will they do it with 4 percent inflation?

    Note that four months after the stimulus was passed, no Democrats would stand up and defend it. Yet the stimulus was carried out without a problem. Four months after the Evans Rule, it looked like Bernanke’s coalition was weakening, and that has major implications. The Wonkblog piece I wrote notes that the next step will have to be an explicit, permanent, new target. That would get around these issues about how permanent the monetary expansion will be. But if there’s barely enough support for the Evans Rule, it makes me worried we won’t get there anytime soon.

    [1] Responses include: Scott Sumner, Matt Yglesias, Paul Krugman, Reihan Salam, Ryan Avent, David Becksworth, Uneasy Money, Ramesh Ponnuru, southofthe49th, as well as a communist anarchist critique at pogoprinciple which notes that my “post-Fordist national fascist state fiscal policy” is exhausted. And that while “Keynesians are playing checkers, the monetarists are playing three dimensional chess.” Hmmm.

    [2] If the Evans Rule was a bust from the get-go, was all that 2012 energy put into trying to find clever ways of explaining “Delphic” versus “Odyssean” guidance language to a general audience a waste of time? Boo.

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    Reinhart-Rogoff a Week Later: Why Does This Matter?

    Apr 24, 2013Mike Konczal

    Retreat!

    Well this is progress. We are seeing distancing by conservative writers on the Reinhart/Rogoff thesis. In Feburary, Douglas Holtz-Eakin wrote, “The debt hurts the economy already. The canonical work of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and its successors carry a clear message: countries that have gross government debt in excess of 90% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are in the debt danger zone. Entering the zone means slower economic growth. Granted, the research is not yet robust enough to say exactly when and how a crisis will engulf the US, but there is no reason to believe that America is somehow immune." (h/t QZ.)

    Today, Holtz-Eakin writes about Reinhart and Rogoff in National Review, but drops the "canonical" status. Now they are just two random people with some common sense the left is beating up. "In order to distract from the dismal state of analytic and actual economic affairs, the latest tactic is to blame...two researchers, Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff, who made the reasonable observation that ever-larger amounts of debt must eventually be associated with bad economic news."

    That's not actually what they said, and if you read Holtz-Eakin in February Reinhart-Rogoff is sufficient evidence to enact the specific plans he wants. Now there's no defense of the "danger zone" argument; just the idea that the stimulus failed. Retreat!

    This is getting a bigger audience. (If you haven't seen The Colbert Report on the Reinhart/Rogoff issue, it's fantastic.) But going foward, plan beats no plan. And a critique isn't a plan. So what should we conclude about Reinhart-Rogoff a week later, now that the critique seems to have won? How should the government approach the debt?

    Cliffs and Tradeoffs

    One thing about the "cliff" metaphor is that there's no tradeoff that would make it acceptable. If you are driving, there are all kinds of tradeoffs you make with your route, but you'd never agree to a tradeoff that has you driving off a cliff. There were numerous other ways of describing this scenario, either the technical "nonlinearities" or the "danger zone" of Eakin just a few months ago.

    With the danger zone metaphor now out of play, perhaps economists can see the relevant tradeoffs more clearly. Reinhart-Rogoff stand with a small negative relationship between debt and growth, one that is likely driven by low growth rather than high debt. And despite what you've heard, there's no literature that shows the casuation in the other direction.

    But let's say they found it. Well, what's the relevant tradeoff? If there's even a basic fiscal multipler at work, the upside more than compensates for the downside. As Brad DeLong notes, if you consider a multipler of 1.5 and a marginal tax share of 1/3, the small correlation people are finding - Delong uses 0.006 percent from an in-house estimate - are more than canceled. Spending 2 percent more causes a bump of 3 percent of GDP, while debt goes up 1 percent of GDP. As Delong notes, "3% higher GDP this year and slower growth that leads to GDP lower by 0.06% in a decade. And this is supposed to be an argument against expansionary fiscal policy right now?"

    And as the IMF noted recently, "Studies suggest that fiscal multipliers are currently high in many advanced economies. One important implication is that fiscal tightening could raise the debt ratio in the short term, as fiscal gains are partly wiped out by the decline in output." Now is the time to move away from austerity and towards more expansion. There are costs (though debt servicing is at a historic low), but the benefits outweight them.
     
    Right now people are debating what level of debt-to-GDP we should level out at and how quickly that debt should begin to come down. There's also the debt ceiling battle coming at the end of the summer. This new information will influence all these conversations.
     
    Was it Important?
     
    Meanwhile, Ryan Avent at The Economist's Free Exchange writes about Reinhart-Rogoff here. To address one of his points, Avent also thinks that the Reinhart-Rogoff cliff results are overplayed as something that actually impacted policy. This is always a tricky question to answer, but Reinhart-Rogoff certainly dominated the sensible, mainstream conversation over the deficit and was a favorite go-to for conservatives in particular. I also think it was popular among journalists, because it was a straight-line number that was supposed to not require complicated modelng. Media Matters put together this video of people discussing the Reinhart-Rogoff cutoff:

    (Bonus fun: in the video, at the 1m20s, Niall Ferguson refers to the 90 percent result as "the law of finance.")

    I think the ideas matter. (Why else would we do this?) I think it's important to understand this revelation in light of other players moving against austerity, including both the IMF and the financial industry. As people reposition themselves, understanding that one of the core old ideas is now out of play allows a different reconfiguration of power. Also, it's worth repeating, it's becoming harder to pretend that austerity hasn't failed. It didn't even do the actual goal, which was reduce the debt-to-GDP ratios of the countries that were being targeted.

    Citizens across the world who were normally indifferent are realizing that they were sold a bad bag of goods when it came to austerity and belt-tightening. They are now trying to figure out what happened, and how things could be done differently. As these are such critical issues, this examination is important. It's great we are having it.

    Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

      

     

    Retreat!

    Well this is progress. We are seeing distancing by conservative writers on the Reinhart/Rogoff thesis. In Feburary, Douglas Holtz-Eakin wrote, “The debt hurts the economy already. The canonical work of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and its successors carry a clear message: countries that have gross government debt in excess of 90% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are in the debt danger zone. Entering the zone means slower economic growth. Granted, the research is not yet robust enough to say exactly when and how a crisis will engulf the US, but there is no reason to believe that America is somehow immune." (h/t QZ.)

    Today, Holtz-Eakin writes about Reinhart and Rogoff in National Review, but drops the "canonical" status. Now they are just two random people with some common sense the left is beating up. "In order to distract from the dismal state of analytic and actual economic affairs, the latest tactic is to blame...two researchers, Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff, who made the reasonable observation that ever-larger amounts of debt must eventually be associated with bad economic news."

    That's not actually what they said, and if you read Holtz-Eakin in February Reinhart-Rogoff is sufficient evidence to enact the specific plans he wants. Now there's no defense of the "danger zone" argument; just the idea that the stimulus failed. Retreat!

    This is getting a bigger audience. (If you haven't seen The Colbert Report on the Reinhart/Rogoff issue, it's fantastic.) But going foward, plan beats no plan. And a critique isn't a plan. So what should we conclude about Reinhart-Rogoff a week later, now that the critique seems to have won? How should the government approach the debt?

    Cliffs and Tradeoffs

    One thing about the "cliff" metaphor is that there's no tradeoff that would make it acceptable. If you are driving, there are all kinds of tradeoffs you make with your route, but you'd never agree to a tradeoff that has you driving off a cliff. There were numerous other ways of describing this scenario, either the technical "nonlinearities" or the "danger zone" of Eakin just a few months ago.

    With the danger zone metaphor now out of play, perhaps economists can see the relevant tradeoffs more clearly. Reinhart-Rogoff stand with a small negative relationship between debt and growth, one that is likely driven by low growth rather than high debt. And despite what you've heard, there's no literature that shows the casuation in the other direction.

    But let's say they found it. Well, what's the relevant tradeoff? If there's even a basic fiscal multipler at work, the upside more than compensates for the downside. As Brad DeLong notes, if you consider a multipler of 1.5 and a marginal tax share of 1/3, the small correlation people are finding - Delong uses 0.006 percent from an in-house estimate - are more than canceled. Spending 2 percent more causes a bump of 3 percent of GDP, while debt goes up 1 percent of GDP. As Delong notes, "3% higher GDP this year and slower growth that leads to GDP lower by 0.06% in a decade. And this is supposed to be an argument against expansionary fiscal policy right now?"

    And as the IMF noted recently, "Studies suggest that fiscal multipliers are currently high in many advanced economies. One important implication is that fiscal tightening could raise the debt ratio in the short term, as fiscal gains are partly wiped out by the decline in output." Now is the time to move away from austerity and towards more expansion. There are costs (though debt servicing is at a historic low), but the benefits outweight them.
     
    Right now people are debating what level of debt-to-GDP we should level out at and how quickly that debt should begin to come down. There's also the debt ceiling battle coming at the end of the summer. This new information will influence all these conversations.
     
    Was it Important?
     
    Meanwhile, Ryan Avent at The Economist's Free Exchange writes about Reinhart-Rogoff here. To address one of his points, Avent also thinks that the Reinhart-Rogoff cliff results are overplayed as something that actually impacted policy. This is always a tricky question to answer, but Reinhart-Rogoff certainly dominated the sensible, mainstream conversation over the deficit and was a favorite go-to for conservatives in particular. I also think it was popular among journalists, because it was a straight-line number that was supposed to not require complicated modelng. Media Matters put together this video of people discussing the Reinhart-Rogoff cutoff:

    (Bonus fun: in the video, at the 1m20s, Niall Ferguson refers to the 90 percent result as "the law of finance.")

    I think the ideas matter. (Why else would we do this?) I think it's important to understand this revelation in light of other players moving against austerity, including both the IMF and the financial industry. As people reposition themselves, understanding that one of the core old ideas is now out of play allows a different reconfiguration of power. Also, it's worth repeating, it's becoming harder to pretend that austerity hasn't failed. It didn't even do the actual goal, which was reduce the debt-to-GDP ratios of the countries that were being targeted.

    Citizens across the world who were normally indifferent are realizing that they were sold a bad bag of goods when it came to austerity and belt-tightening. They are now trying to figure out what happened, and how things could be done differently. As these are such critical issues, this examination is important. It's great we are having it.

    Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

      

     

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